PC-BSD is based on BSD Unix, meaning that it is not a Linux distribution. If you have used Linux before, you will find that some features that you are used to have different names on a BSD system and that some commands are different. This section covers some of these differences.

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Filesystems

BSD and Linux use different filesystems during installation. Many Linux distros use EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, or ReiserFS, while PC-BSD uses UFS or ZFS. This means that if you wish to dual-boot with Linux or access data on an external drive that has been formatted with a Linux filesystem, you will want to do a bit of research first to see if the data can be made available on both operating systems.

Table 1.4a summarizes the various filesystems commonly used by desktop systems. Most of the desktop managers available from PC-BSD should automatically mount the following filesystems: FAT16, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3 (without journaling), EXT4 (read-only), NTFS5, NTFS6, and XFS. See Files and File Sharing for more information about available file manager utilities.

Journaling is not supported. This means that you won't be able to mount a filesystem requiring a journal replay unless you fsck it using an external utility such as e2fsprogs[4]. EXT3 filesystems converted to EXT4 may be more likely to have better results. May not work. Neither having extended attributes 'enabled' nor inodes greater than 128-bytes are supported.

Device Names

Linux and BSD use different naming conventions for devices. For example:

in Linux, Ethernet interfaces begin with eth; in BSD, interface names indicate the name of the driver. For example, an Ethernet interface may be listed as re0, indicating that it uses the Realtek re driver. The advantage of this convention is that you can read the man 4 page for the driver (e.g. type man 4 re) to see which models and features are provided by that driver.